James Dunk

And so she, by various ways, comes to this understanding of what had happened to her grandmother and how that actually seemed to make sense of her quite difficult relations with the force, the direction of Malaysian politics and with her close friends who are caught up in that movement in quite tragic ways.

No, not at all.

Yeah, Melbourne plays this interesting role in the novel.

We're aware that the author kind of has experience of living in Melbourne and going through education and now teaching there.

But in the story, I mean, it's not set in Melbourne and yet,

Sandia, partly following her grandmother's advice, takes up and leaves this really contested, conflictual tensions of Malaysia and goes to Melbourne.

And it's a sort of an escape for her, I think, from this particular kind of imperial history.

Of course, Australia, Melbourne has its very distinct kinds of colonial history.

And yet it works out quite differently in such a cosmopolitan city as Melbourne.

She's drawn into this global world of education and research and teaching and writing.

What's interesting is the way that she actually comes back from that world to see her grandmother as she's dying and the way that that creates a tension for her between that whole new world and this place and this person and this whole history that she's tried to run away from.

For me it's really difficult you know towards the end there's this sense that a line that is repeated it's one of the chapter titles everything is has always been

And that's partly referring to these kind of old, old tensions that keep recurring throughout history.

But also I think reading it towards the end where the author tries to bring all this together in this moment of closure for Susheela as she's dying.

She kind of reaches this moment of peace.

And Sandhya kind of sees that and helps her and joins her in that moment of peace.

But also I want to say, you know, there's a way in which this history is actually really important, but it's not just recurring or cyclical, but actually

what this book does is, in really interesting ways, draw us into this history of violence for this family and for these communities.

And it tries to say, it tries to reconcile that in the way that we've spoken about.

But I guess the story is really important.